With the explosive growth in the number and complexity of Web 2.0 applications, software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud computing, and other enterprise applications, datacenter workloads have increased dramatically. The business opportunities created by these new applications are substantial, but the demands they place on the datacenter are daunting.
The success of modern web sites and other enterprise applications depends heavily on the ability to effectively scale both the data tier and the caching tier on which these applications depend. Unfortunately, ordinary server, database, data store, and caching infrastructures are loosely integrated and minimally optimized. As a result, existing datacenter solutions do not adequately address the performance, capacity, scaling, reliability, and power challenges of supporting dynamic online data and services effectively.